Manifesto for Organic Bandwidth v1.0

Operating Principles

Trust requires bandwidth, whether trust in one's senses, one's balance, or one's friends. The channel must be fast, high capacity, reciprocal, low-noise, and unbiased. The better the information flow, the better the trust.

Human brains, like those of all mammals, evolved to control a 3-D body in a 3-D environment using irregular, undersampled sensory data. That astonishing feat imposes several computational compromises:

In the natural world, attentional attraction can be fooled by lures, and attentional aversion fooled by camouflage.

Among artificial sources, attentional instincts can be fooled by signals and sensations optimized to do so. Over-consumptoin of such signals leads to subtle forms of sensory and sensori-motor deprivation.

For efficiency, perceptual faults are hidden , as the brain hides the retina's blind spot.

Feedback traps are inevitable in such a high-dimensional nonlinear system. They lead to low-entropy "stuck" states such as over-specialization, spinal mis-alignment, or addiction to selected patterns.

Ideal environments

The ideal environment for healing a sensorimotor system has the same statistical properties as the environment for which it evolved:

An ideal temporal environment would have no interruptions more surprising than raindrops or lightning, no divisions of continuous time, and as long a duration as possible. For example, a mountain retreat with no electronic connectivity. Interactions in it would add no noise, delays, or temporal uncertainties beyond those found in air.

An ideal physical environment would contain naturally-textured multiscale 3-D patterns in flicker-free natural light, as in mountains or forests. Nothing would be biased or selected in sensorially significant ways. Signals would arrive into all senses synchronously and unimpeded.

An ideal social environment would contain supportive fellow humans in close proximity, without words, categories, or judgements, and with the tightest vibrational coupling possible. For example, the calming and trust-building technique of "resonating mindfulness" couple several people non-verbally: mechanically (e.g. hands-to-spines), acoustically (semi-vocalized breath), and visually (eye-gazing).